IDA: What's new in 7.1

Highlights

Welcome to IDA 7.1!

With this version of IDA we publish the decompiler intermediate language: the microcode.
We were planning to do it since very long time but the microcode was constantly
evolving, we could not do it. After ten years of evolution it looks mature
and ready to be published. We believe that it will permit our users to
implement much more powerful and higher level analysis algorithms than before.
In the future we plan to use the microcode in IDA too: if the decompiler is
present, the analysis will be improved automatically.

Second, we improved the debugger module API in IDA v7.1. While the rest of the
API was modernized in v7.0, we had no time to handle the debugger API. Now it is
done, and we have new shiny calls (and got rid of the legacy definitions).
While at it, we also improved the speed of the binary search and added support for named
threads. Unfortunately, the change of the API means that third party debugger
plugins need to be ported to IDA v7.1. We prepared a short porting guide for
that, please see:
here.

We also improved our DEX loader to handle multidex android packages. They are
becoming more and more popular, and this shortcoming was becoming really limiting.

Please pay attention to the segments HEADER2, TYPES2, METHODS2, etc.

We removed two debugger modules with this release: WinCE and Symbian. We haven't
heard any feedback about them since ages and nobody voiced against it when
we polled our users on our forum, so we decided to let the obsolete stuff to disappear.

There are numerous tiny improvements, both in IDA in the Decompiler. While we do not
list all of them below, the output of both tools became clearer and easier to read
in many cases.

BUGFIX: IDA could INTERR (40481) in case the user was switching back & forth between flat & graph view on a function that is hidden, and in the beginning of a segment which displays some additional information

BUGFIX: IDA could crash with out of memory error in some ARM64 files, especially if using the decompiler